Perfect Service

Perfect service,
and the brush of a stranger's hair
on your arm.
And wanting to write like Hemmingway.
And wanting to write like Joni Mitchell.
And wanting to paint as if their words have stumbled somehow
from exhausted presses,
whose letters no longer say
but only mean,
to the biggest empty page that they could find.

Wanting to paint as if you have
forever to understand these words
not scrawled across the canvas
but embedded on,
embossed upon
its surface. Wait forever
for the perfect sleepless night to take you
out of skin and meaning
of the darker sky and room,
the bed too warm,
too wide.

Wade
across the stillness
of a house with no one in it
save for Ludo, and he's sleeping
to a painting full of circles
looking forward to the spring.

Home Barefoot

I walked home, barefoot in the rain.
I walked home barefoot, in the rain.
I walked, home, barefoot in the rain.
I walked home barefoot; in the rain
the ground was warm enough
when puddles soaked, stroked
and soothed my ankles,
and falling water whispered to me.

Falling water whispered,
to me of all people,
whispered to me,
of all people.
All people
whispered to me
of
water
falling

on the drum of my umbrella's skin,
on
my
skin.

The ground is warmed when exhaling.

Evening

Sex and the smell of lilies
or peonies, lurid blossoms hanging heavily obsene
in the twilight.
Your skirt riding high
over white thighs.
Bixies pedal furious
bat patterns.

Ten o'clock, and nothing calls
like bed and a cool home
full of silence.

Nothing like a warm drum,
a stoned drum,
an easy fuck between laundered sheets
and memories of the lavender
I keep forgetting to plant.
Was there ever such a thing as an easy fuck?

You Told Me

You told me
that artists come and go a little farther
than the others;
we feel it when we fall so much harder
than our mothers
ever warned us.

Artists see the light,
and musicians are jonesing for the perfect sound
and it's alright
that loving feels like I'm about to drown.

Across the Sheet

That fiercely empty
half bed and belly
where a man or child should lie are sharply hollow
and full of secrets.

Too far from the wall, the bed's too wide;
its distance makes my foetal
curl unable to cross
between myself and the destiny bred in my womb.
Girl-woman, turned on herself away
from the bare cold of a night
when the others are burning midnight oil for music,
when even the weight of a guitar on her belly
would be better than nothing at all.

Ice Bridge to America

Middle morning
and swallows are flying
everywhere over water
miraculous in its stillness.
You behind me do not move.

There's a canvas resting behind us, sleeping
at home in the dark
of my closed room, the pause
between the flick and stroke of fingers
and the scrape of charred wood.
You behind me do not move.

Girl at Myriad

Old pale lace and steam from your tea
combine. What are you writing,
lovely girl with your double-bridged nose;
what language are you learning?

''You know what they say about girls with red shoes,''
an auntie told me once.

If she only saw you.

Listening

Think of me
as swallowing all that you say to me.
I will take your words into my open mouth,
taste them,
feel their shapes, sharp and flat as river grass.
I will envelope these blades in my body
and they will be no more.